Case: CRIPA investigation of Grant County (Kentucky) Jail

On November 4, 2003, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division (DOJ) issued a notice letter announcing that it had opened a CRIPA investigation into detainee conditions in the Grant County Detention Center (GDC) in Williamstown. (Source) The DOJ initiated the investigation into GCDC after a sexual attack on a teenager that occurred in early 2003 brought this detention center onto the department’s radar; the attack was encouraged by GCDC guards. 

In February of 2004, the DOJ conducted an onsite inspection of GCDC with consultants in the fields of correctional management and medical care, as was reported in the introduction of the findings letter, which was issued later in 2005. The findings letter noted that during this inspection, consultants interviewed the jailer, jail staff, a corrections consultant employed by jail, medical care providers, and detainees, and surveyed documents including inspection records, jail policies and procedures, incident reports, and individual detainee records. (Source)

On May 18, 2005, the DOJ issued a findings report based on this inspection. The report determined that detainees “often received inadequate protection from physical harm by other detainees” and “ experience[d] deliberate indifference towards serious medical needs,” and that these conditions appeared to violate the 8th and 14th Amendment rights of the U.S. Constitution. (Source) The report also identified staffing insufficiencies which, although on their own did not constitute constitutional violations, contributed to and exacerbated the two constitutional violations the report identified. 

For years after the DOJ’s finding letter was issued, the county refused to sign off on the DOJ’s proposed 16 remedial measures. On August 8, 2006, in response to the DOJ’s 2005 findings letter, the Grant County Attorney sent a letter to the DOJ that denied any constitutional violations at the jail. The County attorney asserted that the facility was a “model facility.”  Similarly, in December 2007, the attorney wrote that the facility was not violating any provisions of the Constitution, any federal law, [or] any state law, either in a criminal or civil sense. In July 2008, the county reiterated its position calling the DOJ case “a misuse of taxpayer dollars.” 

 Despite its resistance, in August of 2009, the County finally signed a letter of agreement agreeing to implement the remedial measures necessary to resolve any constitutional violations that the DOJ had identified in its prior investigation. In this communication, the DOJ predicted in that just two more inspections, one per year, of the jail would be sufficient to conclude the case. The letter explicitly noticed that the County’s signature on the letter did not constitute admittal of any constitutional violations. (Source)

 While the DOJ may have predicted that just two more years and two more inspections of the jail would be sufficient to conclude the case, it remains open today, more than ten years later. Between the 2009 issuing of the letter of agreement and now, the DOJ has conducted at least six inspections of the jail, dated December 2009, October 2012, June 2014, July 2017, November 2017, and April 2018; the DOJ’s findings reports that they issued after each of these inspections noted that despite the signed letter of agreement, there has been barely any improvement or none at all with regards to detainee-on-detainee violence while on-site mental healthcare conditions have actually regressed. 

A 2013 letter following the October 2012 inspection of the jail noted that out of the 16 remedial measures identified in the findings report and agreed to in the MOU, the jail had only reached compliance on one of the issues. It had partially complied with 7 of the remedial measures. The other 8 were non-compliant. (Source) According to a news source, the letter the DOJ issued after the June 2014 inspection determined that GCDC had risen to compliance on 2 out of the 16 remedial measures, which still left room for much improvement. (Source) The letter the DOJ issued after the June 2014 inspection determined that GCDC had reached compliance on a third of the 16 identified remedial measures and had attained partial compliance on an additional 9, but had slid back to partial compliance on one measure that had reached compliance following the 2014 inspection demonstrating that even with these steps in the right direction, there remained room for much improvement and that improvement wasn’t a guarantee moving forward. (Source) While the Clearinghouse has not found any public copies of findings letters from inspections after 2016, local news sources covering the inspections after 2017 confirmed that the three most recent inspections continue to report unsatisfactory levels of compliance. (Source), (Source), (Source)

Not only was there little improvement in the conditions at the Grant County Detention Center, there was also little communication—a follow-up letter 6 months after the report from the 2014 inspection chastised the County for taking more than 6 months to respond to the 2014 inspection report. In the midst of all of this, local news coverage also revealed that the County had passed an amendment in July 2016 to close the Grant County Detention Center (Source), but GCDC remained open after the County determined that moving their detainees to other institutions in the area was more expensive than just keeping GCDC open and running. (Source)

According to the 2020 report to Congress on CRIPA, the most recent report available on the DOJ’s website, this case remains open nearly 15 years after the 2009 letter of agreement, although updates on the status of the case beyond 2019 are sparse.